[PD-dev] Unit tests

Marvin Humphrey marvin at rectangular.com
Wed Sep 28 21:13:57 CEST 2011


(moving this thread off of pd-list and onto pd-dev...)

On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 10:55:09AM -0400, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
>> I don't see any unit tests.   Are there any?
>
> There isn't really any unified test method.  I think the zexy library  
> has some, 

I looked at zexy's system to see what testing framework it used, in the hopes
that Pd Vanilla could use the same one.  But zexy is using its own custom rig
and zexy is under the GPL, so I'm still looking for other solutions.

> and someone else recently starting writing a test framework in Lua.  

Hmm, it's always good to have something rather than nothing, but it seems
desirable to have a test framework written in Tcl, C or Pd rather than to add
Lua as a dependency.

Writing a simple testing framework for imperative code is easy.  (I've written
two and hacked on several.)  Gui testing is much harder, so my initial thought
is to just avoid it altogether and focus on imperative testing.

[ ... /me browses web, discovers tcltest ... ]

Hmm, wouldn't tcltest be the obvious framework to use?

    http://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl/TclCmd/tcltest.htm

> But regular automated unit tests is something that we sorely need.

In the abstract, I'm interested in this.  Writing some test cases would be a
great way for me to improve my skills with both Tcl and Pd.

Any suggestions about areas of Pd that are particularly suitable for unit
testing?

> What we do have is a farm of dev/build servers which you can get ssh  
> access to.
>
> http://puredata.info/docs/developer/PdLab

Cool, that's a great resource!

Marvin Humphrey




More information about the Pd-dev mailing list